Tracing Color: Pigment, Place, and Material Knowledge with Rhiannon Alpers

Online presentation, Thursday August 13, 2026 7:00pm PDT To receive Zoom link register HERE. Over the past four years, Rhiannon Alpers has created a series of sculptural artist books investigating how color can become a way of knowing a place. Rooted in her lifelong relationship with Colorado’s landscapes, where she was raised and later based for four years, the work traces an evolving inquiry from early investigations of ochre in Colorado’s North Fork Valley to recent artist books and installations inspired by the geology of Garden of the Gods.

Combining local pigments, native plants, geological formations, letterpress printing, monoprinting, and collected specimens, these works explore the relationships between color, material, and environment. Together, they ask how sustained attention to a landscape reveals histories embedded within its colors and materials, and how artist books can preserve that material knowledge through layered narratives that bridge scientific observation and artistic interpretation.

Rhiannon Alpers is a papermaker, letterpress printer, and book artist currently based in Portland, Oregon. She holds both a BA and an MFA in Book and Paper Arts, with 25 years of experience as an educator and commercial printer/bookbinder. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her editioned book and one-of-a-kind work are held in the collections of the Library of Congress, Yale, Stanford, RISD, Bancroft, Cynthia Sears Artist's Books Collection (BIMA), and Rijksmuseum Research Library, among others. Her limited edition and one-of-a-kind artist books are published under the Gazelle and Goat Press imprint. More information about her work is available at rhiannonalpers.com.